( On the other hand, they seemed to go out of their way to create publicity and to make trouble for themselves. For example, they had given the press a pho- tograph of twenty-one Rölls- Royces standing all in a row. Then, Sheela had given an invocation before the state legislatu-re, and that, naturally, had stirred some people up. It was not at all clear why the Rajneeshee did such things. Controversy, I later discovered, had sur- rounded the Rajnee- shee ever since their arrival in the state. The main point of contention was Ante- lope. Just three months after they moved onto the ranch, 1000 Friends of Oregon, a public-interest group dedicated to maintain- ing the strict Oregon land-use laws, had told them they would fight any effort to construct buildings on agricultural land which were not intended for farm use. The Rajneeshee had responded by buying properties in the nearest township-or "city," in Oregon law-for residen- tial and commercial purposes. The forty residents of Antelope, most of them retired people, had refused to give permits for commercial develop- ment. Sued by the Rajneeshee, they had tried to disincorporate the town, but the Rajneeshee had outmaneuvered them by bringing in enough of their own people to outvote them in an elec- tion. The disputes continued until, in the next election, in November of 1982, the Rajneeshee voted most of the older residents off the city council and replaced them with their own people. The Rajneeshee had acted legally- they were well within their rights- but what many people in the area saw was a large and powerful group im- posing its will on a few elderly people who lacked the money and the legal sophistication to fight back. The drama had not ended there. Since taking over Antelope, the Raj- neeshee had been engaged in a new t . ..... y ' . . : ' '" ' .. , !o, >.;:,".. ' ,.. ' ^ \^ ':: ", L . ".. -J "" , " < ., )( .... .' 47 \ l I ' l. " , r :: *< , , , ..... OJ ,ner' , .. 'k'" V'" >,:,.1 ;.",/"" "..: t c t! ,'\ \ ;:" r "It's nothzng, really, Mr. Phelps. I had Just never heard of a place called the Prusszan Tea Room before." . series of legal struggles. Wasco County had given them permission to incorporate a "city" on the ranch, but the local ranchers and 1000 Friends were now challenging the incorpora- tion, on the ground that the county had not submitted it to state land-use- planning scrutiny. If the Rajneeshee lost, they might have to tear their city down. Then, in late December of 1982, the Portland office of the Immi- gration and Naturalization Service had issued orders denying Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh permanent-resident status, and his disciples were now fighting his deportation to India. In addition, they were preparing their re- sponse to a suit, visible on the horizon, on the issue of whether the municipal status of their commune violated the religious-establishment clause of the Constitution. By mid-May, the Raj- neeshee, for their part, were suing two of their neighbors for defamation and the former Antelope city council for discrimination. An in all, there were fifteen lawsuits in process. After Antelope, too, the Rajneeshee had become a major political issue in . the state. In another state-New York or California, say-even six hundred red-clad people might disappear into the variegated human landscape, and the fate of forty householders might be a day's story. But Oregon, though it covers ninety-seven thousand square miles, has a population of only three million; and it has a very well-devel- oped sense of its own identity. Public- spirited and relatively homogeneous, Oregonians behave in many ways like the citizens of a single town-or two towns, really: one in the Willamette Valley, with its green fields and its string of universities, and the other in the dry wheat fields and rangeland east of the Cascades. In the spring of 1983, every state legislator had to have a position on the Rajneeshee. They had many defenders, particularly in the universities, but their Antelope victory had turned many people against them. In the Willamette Valley, they pro- voked interest and concern, but in Wasco and Jefferson Counties they were fighting the nearest thing to a range war. Strangely, in spite of all this contro-